Since its publication in hardcover, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love has been hailed as a book of rare beauty and importance, and has been shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and selected for the January 2011 Indie Next List. With astounding depth and elegance, it takes the reader through the haunting atmosphere of a country at war, delicately intertwining the powerful stories of two generations.
In contemporary Freetown, a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with secrets to keep. In the capital hospital Kai, a gifted young surgeon is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies Elias Cole, a man who has stories to tell from the country’s turbulent postcolonial years that are far from heroic. As past and present intersect, Kai and Elias are drawn unwittingly closer by Adrian, a British psychiatrist with good intentions, and into the path of one woman at the center of their stories.
A work of breathtaking writing and rare wisdom, The Memory of Love seamlessly weaves together the lives of these three men to create a story of loss, absolution, and the indelible effects of the past—and the very nature of love.

This radical collection of short stories is a double award-winning book aimed at debunking the myth about African women as impoverished victims. The stories deal with challenging themes representing some of the more complex love stories ever published from Afirca, ranging from labour pains to burials, teenagers to octogenarians, race fraught and same-sex relationships, the human heart is out there, bold, bleeding and occasionally triumphant. Crafted by a stellar cast of authors including El Saadawi, Adichie, Atta, Baingana, Oyeyemi, Manyinka, Aboulela, wa Goro, Badoe, Magona, Tadjo, Krog, Ogundipe, de Nyeko et al. A much welcomed addition to African literature.

A new masterpiece from the author of "The Swallows of Kabul."
Frankfurt MD Kurt Krausmann is devastated by his wife's suicide. Unable to make sense of what happened, Kurt agrees to join his friend Hans on a humanitarian mission to the Comoros. But, sailing down the Red Sea, their boat is boarded by Somali pirates and the men are taken hostage.
The arduous journey to the pirates' desert hideout is only the beginning of Kurt's odyssey. He endures imprisonment and brutality at the hands of captors whose failings are all too human.
As the situation deteriorates, it is fellow prisoner, Bruno, a long-time resident in Africa, who shows Kurt another side to the wounded yet defiant continent he loves.
A giant of francophone writing, Algerian author Yasmina Khadra takes current events as a starting point to explore opposing views and myths of Africa and the West, ultimately delivering a powerful message of friendship, resilience, and redemption.
Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer and now director of the Algerian Cultural Center in Paris. In November 2013, he announced his candidacy for the presidency of Algeria.

In many of these stories, there is a sense that things are not as they seem: a woman's husband-to-be has a questionable past and a voluptuous stranger's beauty belies her malevolence. Characters are shaped by the particular challenges of their context - a young pregnant Mosarwa girl is forced to make a terrible decision and the barren wife of a wealthy Gaborone man is made to see an old woman with supposed powers of fertility. Atmospheric and evocative, these stories will entertain and transport you to the hot, dusty heart of Botswana.

Set in the 1990s in West Africa, Saturday's Shadows is a novel about the slow, yet unpredictable implosion of a marriage. It is also a tale of love and devotion, as well as a study in the psychology of tyrants and how their rule destroys not only their subjects but themselves. Influenced by Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk (Anchor, 1956) and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), Saturday's Shadows allows its four characters to narrate how they will do almost anything to find themselves.

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by theWashington Post Book Worldas the "21st century daughter" of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s.

A "beautifully written"* (New York Times Book Review) novel of redemption by a prize-winning international literary star.
From the acclaimed author of The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears comes a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination.
Following the death of his father Yosef, Jonas Woldemariam feels compelled to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, he sets out to retrace his mother and father's honeymoon as young Ethiopian immigrants and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn country of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his life in America today. In so doing, he crafts a story- real or invented-that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

This response to Camus's The Stranger is at once a love story and a political manifesto about post-colonial Algeria, Islam, and the irrelevance of Arab lives. He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus's classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name--Musa--and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach. Harun is an old man tormented by frustration. In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die.

Keys in the River is a cycle of stories about economically-challenged, politically-torn, and disease-ridden Zimbabwe, told as if the reader were sitting and listening to neighbors and friends talking about life. Some stories are tender, even comic; in others, tragedy and outrage lurk. The stories share a common thread, a noble stance in the struggle to find love, freedom, justice, completeness, and satisfaction.

An irresistible and heart-warming child's-eye view novel set in Africa -- Michel is ten years old, living in Pointe Noire, Congo, in the 1970s. His mother sells peanuts at the market, his father works at the Victory Palace Hotel, and brings home books left behind by the white guests. Planes cross the sky overhead, and Michel and his friend Lounès dream about the countries where they'll land.While news comes over the radio of the American hostage crisis in Tehran, the death of the Shah, the scandal of the Boukassa diamonds, Michel struggles with the demands of his twelve year old girlfriend Caroline, who threatens to leave him for a bully in the football team. But most worrying forMichel, the witch doctor has told his mother that he has hidden the key to her womb, and must return it before she can have another child. Somehow he must find it.TomorrowI'll Be Twentyis a humorous and poignant account of an African childhood, drawn from Alain Mabanckou's life.

Damon Galgut established himself as a writer of international caliber with the publication of The Good Doctor, which was sold in sixteen countries and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa. The Quarry, written ten years ago but never published outside South Africa, is another stark, intense, and crystalline novel in which human nature betrays itself against the desolate backdrop of rural South Africa. It opens with a chance meeting on a lonely stretch of road, when a man picks up a hitchhiker. The driver is a minister on his way to a new congregation in an isolated village and the passenger, a fugitive from justice. When the minister realizes this, and confronts his passenger overlooking an empty quarry, the response is deadly. As the fugitice and the local police chief play out a tense game of cat and mouse, Damon Galgut gives us a devastating combat for man’s most prized attribute: freedom

Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her--from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee--while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990's, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.
Told from the point of view of nine year old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990's Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings.
What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers. Dazzling and viscerally powerful, "The Fishermen" never leaves Akure but the story it tells has enormous universal appeal. Seen through the prism of one family's destiny, this is an essential novel about Africa with all of its contradictions-economic, political, and religious-and the epic beauty of its own culture.
With this bold debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices of modern African literature, echoing its older generation's masterful storytelling with a contemporary fearlessness and purpose.

The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series has become a global phenomenon selling over 20 million copies. Zimbabwean born author Alexander McCall Smith brings us Mma Ramotswe, proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Follow her adventures as she navigates the cases of her clients and the complexities of her personal life with charm, wisdom, and a healthy dose of humor. This special 5-book boxed set includes the following titles - (1) The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, (2) Tears of the Giraffe, (3) Morality for Beautiful Girls, (4) The Kalahari Typing School for Men, and (5) The Full Cupboard of Life.

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks--with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul--her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tensions that persist in her homeland, South Africa. And in each new work is fresh evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters, and the difficult choices with which they are faced.
In "No Time Like the Present," Gordimer trains her keen eye on Steve and Jabulile, an interracial couple living in a newly, tentatively, free South Africa. They have a daughter, Sindiswa; they move to the suburbs; Steve becomes a lecturer at a university; Jabulile trains to become a lawyer; there is another child, a boy this time. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself post-apartheid.
The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless. In "No Time Like the Present," she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.

In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, the wife of a British oil executive has been kidnapped. Two journalists a young upstart, Rufus, and a once-great, now disillusioned veteran, Zaq are sent to find her. In a story rich with atmosphere and taut with suspense, Oil on Water explores the conflict between idealism and cynical disillusionment in a journey full of danger and unintended consequences.As Rufus and Zaq navigate polluted rivers flanked by exploded and dormant oil wells, in search of the white woman, they must contend with the brutality of both government soldiers and militants. Assailed by irresolvable versions of the truth about the woman s disappearance, dependent on the kindness of strangers of unknowable loyalties, their journalistic objectivity will prove unsustainable, but other values might yet salvage their human dignity.

The phenomenal success of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency continues with the bestselling Kalahari Typing School for Men, the fourth book in the series. Mma Precious Ramotswe is content. Her business is well established with many satisfied customers, and in her mid-thirties ("the finest age to be") she has a house, two adopted children, a fine fiance. But, as always, there are troubles. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni has not set the date for their marriage. Her able assistant, Mma Makutsi, wants a husband. And worse, a rival detective agency has opened in town--an agency that does not have the gentle approach to business that Mma Ramotswe's does. But, of course, Precious will manage these things, as she always does, with her uncanny insight and her good heart.

This spell binding and inspiring novel weaves deception, cultures and the intrigue of love for a romantic journey that spans two continents and challenges the cornerstone of faith. When Feranmi's parents decide it's time for their daughter to get married, they have the perfect man for the job. Is being single a crime? Why will her parents not let this rest? When she was ready to get married she'll do the picking. Her parents are coming to the U.S for a visit, so she comes up with the perfect plan to deceive them into believing she is in a committed relationship. Luckily, Alex an old friend, is willing to play the part but on one condition....